When people trust in a product, a person, a service, or a stock, they generally feel encouraged to invest money, time and energy. Feeling better about themselves and being more confident about their ability to make wise decisions will help them to see and understand value.
What the concept of neurodiversity has to offer is allowing a broader spectrum of people the opportunity of being worthy of investment and also ultimately becoming wise investors.
How you invest in people teaches them about their worth. If the way you invest in your relationship with a person is with your efforts to fix them so that then they are seen as worthy or become that way to you, you are not only teaching them a way to judge the value of people, but you are also teaching them what value they have according to that scale.
If someone doesn't feel that others see their worth, they are less likely to invest in themselves. What's even worse is the fact that they are likely to seek others who are less worthy by the judgment standards they have been taught and find ways to make themselves look more worthy than them. Achieving the status then becomes worth more to them than any other accomplishments. If this accomplishment is the top priority, all the rest of their accomplishments will have their worth judged in relation to how this goal is served.
If our political, medical, and legal systems are all geared toward unattainable and commercial expectations then survival and the ways to attain that will not only be secondary but again will be judged by these unattainable and commercial expectations.
The psychology industry thrives on these expectations as well as needing for most people to fail at attaining what they claim to be encouraging.
Unattainable goals which are based on commercial expectations must remain unattainable in order to encourage people to continue striving for them. When most people can't achieve standards for inclusion then the standards are instead being designed to create exclusion.
An economy that thrives on competition must be unreasonable. It must create illusions and cause people to be delusional. Men, women, and children must all be taught to be hunters who strive for something that few people can achieve. When people are trying to achieve what they can't, their only natural conclusion is that someone else must look worse for them to look good.
This is how the DSM-IV is geared to help the economy. Self worth must not be something that people are born with, it must be something that they can only attain by achieving the goals that the market driven society creates for them.
The pharmaceutical industry must not only work together with psychological standards to teach people how they need their products in order to be worthy of societies respect and dignity, but they must also use their product to further control their customers. In the same way that buying a product can only allow you to come only so close to accomplishing the goal they have set for you in their advertising, pharmaceutical medicine does not produce a state that can be attained naturally. This dependence is vital to the survival of the industry. If people are able to find out what is truly normal the achievement of normality will no longer be sought. The fact that these medicines subdue those who take them and are disabling is simply a bonus for the industry.
When a charity shows itself to be focused on commercial investments and using commercial tactics to encourage the investment in their cause, they are working together with the broader system which provides them an already established customer base. Of course Autism Speaks will always be good at what they do. However, other people can't counter what they do or encourage something better, unless it's different. If the goals look similar, the public who is educated in consumerism will simply choose the best within that category which are competing with each other.
When respect is the product the only way for someone or some group to efficiently sell the product is to advertise it as being in a different category which makes it worthy based on a different set of standards.
When people are involved in encouraging respect for autistics in the realm of politics, medicine, and the legal system, they must understand that the people whom they are targeting are too savvy to buy a product based on anything other than how it relates to another product in terms of commercial worth. Unless respect is shown by a different set of standards you will be judged by the standards that people already know and are accustomed to.
We can't show that one group of autistics is better than another or that autistics deserve more respect than any other group who has been oppressed for the same reason and by this same oppressive standard.
Autistic people like any other members of an oppressed group was not born believing they had less value than other people. This had to be taught. There is nothing inherent that makes one person more worthy than another. Once someone has been taught that they are less worthy, they have not only learned to see that the world as unreasonably judgmental, but their inherent trust has been severely damaged.
There is no way to use that standard for teaching people to trust in their inherent worth, unless you show them a different system for judging what determines worth. Once they understand that they will be able to judge others in that way and treat them with respect in the same way they have experienced it.
"Autistic people like any other members of an oppressed group was not born believing they had less value than other people. This had to be taught. There is nothing inherent that makes one person more worthy than another. Once someone has been taught that they are less worthy, they have not only learned to see that the world as unreasonably judgmental, but their inherent trust has been severely damaged."
Absolutely.
Posted by: David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction) | November 22, 2009 at 08:16 AM
It's always good to hear from you David. I hope you're doing well. :)
Posted by: Ed | November 23, 2009 at 06:50 PM